Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

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Bored of Skype? Try these 9 alternatives to change the way you work.

Technological advancements have the uncanny strength of pushing over top-performing apps down the hill. Innovation brings in better utilities for the benefit of the user community. Skype seems to be weathering that for quite some time before being on the way out, almost.

How to stop micromanaging and give your team autonomy

To stop micromanaging, and give your team more autonomy, you could just follow the advice of William McKnight, the founder and one-time president of 3M: “Hire good people and leave them alone.” Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easy in practice, so in this article we’ll cover...

Zendesk Showcase SF: Creating the next wave of contact center culture

“Culture trumps strategy,” say most leadership coaches. “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” As a CX leader, you may agree, but do your support agents feel the same? Delivering a top-notch customer experience means support agents must be inspired by your company’s intended culture and get collaboration, empowerment, and meaning. In this session, Tiffany Apczynski, VP of Social Impact and Public Policy at Zendesk, explains how to break free from the call center of yesterday and shows you the three tactical things you can implement immediately. You’ll learn tips and tricks for creating a contact center culture for today and the future.

Zendesk Showcase SF: Make customer-focused decisions in a data driven world

Making quick, confident, data-driven decisions is difficult—if not impossible–when your customer data is fragmented across different channels and tools. With Zendesk Explore, all your customer data is consolidated in easy-to-build dashboards and reporting. Zendesk's Andrew Forbes and Pinterest's Derrick Diaz show you how to better understand your customers, and measure and improve their entire experience. It’s a data-driven world, so let the data do the talking.

How to Leverage Social Customer Care to Drive Sales and Revenue

Social media is overflowing with more content than anyone can ever consume, and if you want people to pay attention to your content, you have to remember that it’s all about the engagement. Social feeds are less of a megaphone to drive traffic to your site and more about the one-on-one connections and trust that you build with your audience. To grab a customer’s attention and increase revenue from that customer, engagement is vital.

What is a key performance indicator (KPI)?

A KPI is a numeric measure of performance for any activity that’s important to your business. Sometimes known as a ‘performance measure,’ the term KPI is often used interchangeably with ‘metric.’ The only real difference between the two is the word ‘key.’ KPIs are important metrics that you really care about, but a metric is any number that you track.

How to set meaningful and effective KPIs

Aside from an office dog, KPIs might just be the best thing you introduce to your company. After all, they give you the power to measure performance and ultimately improve. But, like an office dog, KPIs should be chosen carefully. Otherwise they can distract teams, damage morale, and generally cause chaos. To help you avoid the pitfalls and get the most from KPIs, here are some tips for setting them.

Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation: which is best for your team?

Motivation is obviously essential for your team’s performance and happiness. And if your company needs any kind of creativity to survive then a certain type of motivation is more effective (spoiler: it’s the intrinsic one). For this reason, most forward-thinking companies are moving away from traditional, extrinsic forms of motivation. But does this mean that "carrot and stick" is officially dead? Not quite.